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- Bigger Is Better for buttons, especially on toolbars.
- Use screen corners and edges.
- Macintosh-style menus are faster than Windows/Unix-style,
because they're on the screen edge.
- Never put a one-pixel non-clickable boundary around buttons
on the screen edge.
- Circular (pie) popup menus are faster than
linear popup menus.
This a merely a summary of the excellent article
"Quiz designed to give you Fitts", on Bruce Tognazzini's website
www.asktog.com.
Read the original article, and check out the rest of his site,
which has many excellent articles.
Fitts' law is pretty straightforward:
the time to acquire a target is a function of the proximity and size of the target.
For example, a user can click on a very large button that is close to the current pointer
position more quickly than they can click on a small button that is further away.
It seems so obvious, doesn't it?
What's more interesting about this law is what it implies.
Self-explanatory.
Toolbar buttons that have both text and pictures are easier to hit,
simply because they are bigger.
Access times do not improve if buttons are smaller and thus closer together;
the important point is that the user will typically be moving to the buttons
from the window's content area (the document) rather than from another button.
| Use screen corners and edges |
The corners and edges of the screen are prime real-estate.
They are ideal locations for buttons, menus, toolbars, taskbars, etc.
Any objects on the sides of the screen effectively have infinite width,
and objects on the bottom and top of the screen have infinite height.
Objects in the corners have infinite width and height.
(Of course, if you use active desktop borders in KDE, you lose this behaviour.)
| Macintosh-style menus are faster |
Macintosh-style menus, which are pinned to the top of the screen,
are known to be much faster than MSWindows-style menus, where the menu is contained within
the floating window. KDE gets a big thumbs-up for providing Macintosh-style menus.
| NEVER put a one-pixel non-clickable boundary around buttons on the screen edge |
The KDE taskbar makes better use of the edge of the screen than the MSWindows taskbar.
This is because the the very last pixel on the KDE taskbar is part of the button,
so if you drag your mouse to the very edge of the screen and click on the taskbar,
you will click on one of the taskbar buttons.
The MSWindows taskbar is not active all the way to the edge of the screen,
so that you must stop your mouse a few pixels away from the edge in order to hit a button.
The KDE Panel seems to mix both styles. The desktop buttons and the show/hide
buttons at each end on the bar are active right to the edge of the screen.
However, the other panel buttons (such as the main KDE menu under the big "K")
have a one-pixel border. Presumably this is so that the user is still able to
right-click on the panel (to configure it) when it is completely full.
However, this isn't necessary as the user can access the Panel configuration
functions via the "Big K" menu.
| Circular popup menus are faster than linear popup menus |
These aren't supported by KDE as far as I know, but I would like them to be.
You only have to move a couple of pixels to enter the sector you want.
Also, if the options are few (say 4), users will quickly learn gestures
to activate the menu e.g. up then right = print, left then up = new.
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